Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Steve Madden Is Back

Steve Madden at his company in Long Island City, Queens.Credit
Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

One crisp morning last month, the shoe titan Steve Madden was ruminating over two sandals laid out on his desk in his factory in Long Island City, Queens: one black with a thin sole; the other creamy beige, its heel thick as sliced bread.

“I want this shoe to be on this bottom,” he said, pressing the beige sole into the black top. “But my team is fighting me to keep it the way it is. I could go in there and say: ‘That’s it. We’re making it.’ But then I think to myself, we work together.”

He breathed an exasperated sigh. “I deal with this a lot,” he said.

Collaboration can be tough, sure — but it beats sharing a jail cell, wondering if you can ever rebuild the life you’ve left behind.

It’s been a decade since Mr. Madden was famously sentenced to 41 months in prison for stock fraud (he served two and a half years) after a flameout fueled by drugs, alcohol and his love of money. He is now creative and design chief of the shoe empire he founded in 1990, having ceded the chief executive title to Ed Rosenfeld, a former investment banker at Peter J. Solomon Company.

Yet Mr. Madden, 55, seems more central to the brand than ever. Mr. Rosenfeld said there was never any question of his not returning — indeed, it became a selling point in ads. And over the last few years the company has prospered through acquisitions, strategic partnerships and some nurturing of orphaned designers. In 2010, the company saved Betsey Johnson, buying the brand for $27.5 million, a bargain after her company was forced into bankruptcy (in an interview, she called him “Stevie Wonder”). Mr. Madden has forged relationships with the Italian sneaker maker Superga, as well as with celebrity designers like Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. He also hired Kari Sigerson, who, along with Miranda Morrison, was fired in 2011 from the company the women founded.

This year, Mr. Madden’s transgressions will be immortalized in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a movie directed by Martin Scorsese about Stratton Oakmont, the investment firm that gave Mr. Madden shares in initial public offerings that he traded illegally. But his past does not seem to bother his forever-young customer base.

“They have no recollection at all,” said Marshal Cohen, the chief retail analyst at the NPD Group, the consumer research company.

Photo

The Deja Vu shoe from the current collection.

Mr. Madden said he is now sober. (“I can’t drink and drug safely, so I choose not to now,” he said. “But it’s not easy.”) And rich: he said he is paid too much, earning $5.41 million in 2012 and granted $80 million in restricted stock. A longtime bachelor, he is now married to one of his former office managers and has 5-year-old twins and a baby on the way.

But there is one thing drifting from Mr. Madden’s grasp: relevance. Though his shoes may find their way into closets by dint of their sheer ubiquity, young tastemakers don’t tend to tout the Steve Madden brand.

“I saw a thing, I think in The New York Post, about the top 10 style chicks that are 20 years old, and none of them mentioned my name,” Mr. Madden said. “And I know they all grew up on my shoes. You would think that one of them would cop to being influenced by Steve Madden. It’s really frustrating for me to see that.”

It also irks him that fashion’s elite snub him as a creator of knockoffs.

“We get no credit from the design community,” Mr. Madden said, his voice a low growl. “Are we influenced by Christian Louboutin? Of course we are. He’s brilliant. But we are, for the most part, creating new shoes every day, and they don’t get it.”

He said his peers in the Council of Fashion Designers of America do not acknowledge him.

MR. MADDEN GREW UP in the Five Towns section of Long Island, the youngest of three boys whose father was in the textile business. On weekends he hitchhiked to Atlantic Beach on the South Shore, where he sneaked into private clubs.

“There was a lot of mind-altering substances taken, if you know what I mean,” he said of his youth. “It was a blur.” But he was always interested in shoes. In high school, he worked in a shoe store called Toulouse; the owner was an artist. “I was used to the kind of people who had money and looked like Don Draper,” Mr. Madden said. “So all of a sudden there is this ex-hippie and he is driving a Mercedes and he’s got long hair. I thought this was great.”

Photo

Steve Madden at his factory in Queens last month.Credit
Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

When he and his friends could not get into Studio 54, they danced at Xenon nearby. Mr. Madden said he attended the University of Miami briefly, but found himself back in New York in 1978 after his father refused to pay his tuition unless he quit goofing off.

Mr. Madden worked at a number of footwear companies before starting his own, opening his first downtown store in 1993. Wendy Ballew, now his wife, joined the company in 1992. A friend warned her to stay away from Mr. Madden, she said, because he was prone to outbursts (she recalled one day when he threw a boot the wrong shade of beige across the room, hitting a coffee pot) and he continued to party. But he had a certain charm.

“He’s very honest and open and, at times, uncomfortably so,” she said.

When asked what motivated her husband in those days, she said, “Money.”

Mr. Madden was onto something with his chunky-heeled boots and platform shoes, which appealed to a generation whose mothers and grandmothers wore stilettos. His breakout was the Mary Lou, a big-toed Mary Jane-style patent leather shoe popular with fashion-forward teens. In 1993, Mr. Madden took his company public at $4 a share, hiring Stratton Oakmont, which had been co-founded by his childhood friend Daniel Porush.

Mr. Madden said he flipped Stratton Oakmont shares for a quick profit, and shared his take with executives at Mr. Porush’s company.

“Oh, God, it was a terrible mistake,” Mr. Madden said. “At the time it was just hubris. We thought we were clever.”

But in May 2001 Mr. Madden pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and securities fraud and was later sentenced. On Sept. 18, 2002, he arrived at a prison at Eglin Air Force Base on Florida’s Panhandle.

“It’s a different world,” he said. “No more restaurants or sex, good food or family. You have a different life, a spartan life.”

He read a lot, including David McCullough’s “John Adams,” a copy of which still sits on his bookshelf, and got into Southern hip-hop music. He also attended court-ordered alcohol rehab. He was taken care of financially by his company, confirming he was paid $700,000 in yearly consulting fees while in jail. Ms. Madden and other colleagues visited their boss monthly.

“He doesn’t deal with people one on one,” she said in the basement living room of the couple’s fairly modest Upper East Side apartment. “He brings his crowd.” She said he recently asked friends to join them for dinner on their anniversary.

“You can’t even imagine,” he said. “It is a unique painful experience that I had and I don’t know how everybody reacts. I guess you get perspective, a different sort. I feel for things, I suppose.” Mostly though, he said, “I thought about surviving.”

Ms. Madden saw a longing for stability.

“On visiting day, everyone had their families around, children, wives,” she said. “All he had were his employees.”

She and her boss wrote letters. “All of a sudden you are holding her hand in the visiting room and you don’t know what is happening,” Mr. Madden said. “And you are stroking her hair.”

He proposed in November 2004, near a vending machine in the visiting room, dressed in prison khakis.

“Prison was so romantic,” Ms. Madden said, beaming, as she flashed an emerald-cut diamond ring. Mr. Madden said he bought it from a fellow prisoner’s sister, who was in the jewelry business.

After Mr. Madden was released, he joked that if his career was over, he could open a bakery and name pastries the way he named shoes.

But “he did make it back into the shoe business, so, no bakery,” Ms. Madden said.

MR. MADDEN, WHO OVERSEES a team of designers, had been disconnected from New York culture for some time.

Photo

Mr. Madden, in 2002, after being sentenced for stock fraud.Credit
AP Photo/Robert Mecea

“My impulse was to jump right in, but I had to lay back, watch, learn and see what needed to be fixed,” Mr. Madden said. “So much of design is context.”

Mr. Rosenfeld saw a soulful upside to Mr. Madden’s ordeal. “He’ll often say to me when we are worrying about something, ‘Seven years ago I was sitting in a jail cell,’ ” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “ ‘We aren’t going to die if this shoe doesn’t sell.’ ”

Mr. Madden, though, continues to be dogged by a reputation as a copycat. In 2009, Alexander McQueen sued, contending that the company copied his Faithful bootee, fashioned after a motorcycle jacket. That same year Balenciaga said in a lawsuit that Steve Madden reproduced its Lego shoe from the fall 2007 collection. The price of the Balenciaga shoe was $4,175, while the Madden shoe sold for about $100.

According to representatives for Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, the lawsuits were settled. They declined further comment. As for Mr. Madden, he said of the Balenciaga lawsuit: “It was silly. They did a multicolored shoe and we did it. It was stupid.” And the McQueen bootee? “I’m sure they were alike. Yeah, of course they were. We see millions of shoes. We are influenced by everything that goes on.”

He showed no regret. “I am not embarrassed by it whatsoever,” Mr. Madden said. “I mean, George Harrison was sued for ‘My Sweet Lord,’ right? And John Lennon was sued over ‘Come Together.’ ”

At least the Olsen twins, who design the trendy Elizabeth and James and Olsenboye lines, are firmly in his camp. “Steve knows more about the shoe market than anybody,” Mary-Kate said.

Last year, Mr. Madden renegotiated his contract to include two stock grants valued at $80 million (that will vest from 2017 to 2023, which means he has to stay to receive them). But he says that money is no longer the important thing in his life.

“I had this uncle, my Uncle Lolly,” he said. “This real scholarly guy. He wasn’t very successful in business but he had a nice family. A nice marriage. In my mind, he wasn’t really a successful man, because that is how I was programmed. I was a better man if I made more money. That is not the case, but I didn’t know that.”

He paused. “So if you are married 50 years to the same woman and have a nice family, you are successful,” he said.